In the 1960s and 70s, while most serious filmgoers associated Italian cinema with great directors such as Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti, Italy was also producing a series of popular sex comedies, sold predominantly on the pulchritudinous charms of the leading lady. One of the prima donnas of the popular commedia all’italiana films was Laura Antonelli, who has died of a heart attack aged 73.

An often scantily clad Antonelli would allow herself to be leered at by men on screen and in the audience, subject to what feminist critics defined as “the male gaze”. Yet despite the raunchy nature of her roles, she was always a subtle performer.

One of the first examples of the wave of Italian sexploitation movies was Salvatore Samperi’s Malicious (Malizia, 1973), which starred Antonelli as the housekeeper working for a family consisting of a widower and his three sons, each of them trying to see as much of her body as possible. Typical is the scene, replicated in the poster, which shows one of the boys looking up Antonelli’s short skirt as she climbs a ladder.

Hard to believe that as a child Antonelli was considered “ugly, clumsy and insignificant” by her parents. “They made me take hours of gym classes during my teens, hoping I would at least develop some grace,” she declared. She was born Laura Antonaz in Pula, then in Italy, now in Croatia, but settled with her family in Naples where she graduated as a gymnastics instructor. She then moved to Rome, where she became a secondary school gym teacher and took modelling jobs.

In the mid-60s, after a few uncredited walk-ons, Antonelli started to be given leading roles in Italian films with international casts. Among the first was Mario Bava’s Dr Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966), a feeble spy spoof whose original title was Le Spie Vengono dal Semifreddo (The Spies Who Came In From the Cold Dessert). It starred Vincent Price as a mad scientist who invents girls who explode when embraced in order to disrupt a Nato gathering, while the US hero, played by the American teen idol Fabian, pursues Antonelli. The producer, Samuel Z Arkoff, blamed the film’s failure on Antonelli’s refusing to take off her clothes. He claimed she was originally willing to, but then his nephew, who was sent to supervise the film, developed a crush on her and dissuaded her.

In Devil in the Flesh (Le Malizie di Venere, 1969), however, an adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s erotic novel, Venus in Furs, Antonelli, as the obsessive Wanda von Dunajew, had no qualms about disrobing for the sex scenes. Unfortunately for her career, though the film was seen worldwide, it was not released in Italy until 1973, when it was immediately confiscated by the authorities.

In the meantime, Antonelli, still relatively unknown, played a hooker opposite James Garner in the spaghetti western A Man Called Sledge (1970) and then appeared in three French films, though initially she spoke little French. While living in Paris and appearing in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s The Scoundrel (Les Mariés de l’An Deux, 1971), a picaresque swashbuckling comedy, she and the film’s star, Jean-Paul Belmondo, began a bumpy relationship that lasted for nine years. (She had been married briefly to the Italian publisher Enrico Piacentini.)

After Philippe Labro’s thriller Without Apparent Motive (Sans Mobile Apparent, 1971) with Jean-Louis Trintignant, she was teamed up again with Belmondo in Claude Chabrol’s Docteur Popaul (aka Scoundrel in White, 1972). A rather grotesque farce, it has Belmondo marrying a bespectacled, buck-toothed Mia Farrow, because he feels safer with ugly women, until he falls for Antonelli, her scrumptious sister.

This was followed by Malicious, which finally brought her huge fame in her home country, and led to several classy soft-core movies in a similar vein, including The Divine Nymph (Divina Creatura, 1975), in which Terence Stamp and Marcello Mastroianni are rivals for her love, and Wifemistress (Mogliamante, 1977) also with Mastroianni.

Undoubtedly her best film was The Innocent (L’Innocente, 1976), the last work by Visconti, who died the same year. Cast against type, Antonelli s superb as the wife of a wealthy Sicilian (Giancarlo Giannini) who is neglected in favour of his mistress (Jennifer O’Neill). When she tries to turn the tables on him by taking a lover, events take a tragic turn with the death of a baby. Adapted from the novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio, it is a poignant tale of sexual double standards.

In Ettore Scola’s Passion of Love (Passione d’Amore, 1981), based on the novel by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, she is the beautiful married mistress of an army captain (Bernard Giraudeau) who tells her that “adultery restores rights otherwise denied to women”. After this psychosexual drama, later made into the musical Passion by Stephen Sondheim, the length of Antonelli’s roles was reduced and the quality of her films declined.

She retired after the sad attempt at a sequel to Malicious in 1991, and when 36 grams of cocaine was found during a police raid on her home. She was subsequently convicted of dealing and sentenced to three-and-a-half years’ house arrest. She appealed, saying that it was for her own private use, but it took 10 years before the conviction was eventually overturned and she was awarded €108,000 (£76,000).

Antonelli spent the last decade of her life alone in seclusion in her villa outside Rome, devout and unwilling to show her face, once gorgeous but now ruined by botched cosmetic surgery. In 2010 the Italian government announced that she was to become the beneficiary of a law that provides financial assistance for artists who have fallen on hard times.